Warren native and current Waitsfield documentary filmmaker Allie Rood’s film about the design build movement as it developed in The Valley offers a glimpse into the past that reveals the direct connection to The Valley we live in today.
Her film, “Prickly Mountain and My Design/Build Life” opens at the Big Picture next week. In the work for almost a decade, her film takes viewers back to the late 1960s and 70s when first one, then another and then another architect made it to Vermont, gathering on a large tract of land in Warren. They began experimenting, having fun, raising families, and ultimately shaping the fate and future of the Mad River Valley with their ideas, creativity and philosophies.
Rood tells the tale based in part on her childhood (where she lived on Prickly Mountain with multiple other families in a large extended family) but also on how the design build ideas began and what they yielded.
It wasn’t just building that came out of that era. It was a way of thinking, an approach to living on the land, interacting with the environment and living intentionally. It’s a fun film with amazing historical photos, great interviews, drone shots that are spot on and an unbelievable amount of history packed into 90 minutes.
She takes viewers through the origins of a group of architectural students and others, who landed in Vermont, drawn to Bauhaus ideals, but not so much to the trapping of formal education (although plenty had degrees). Picking up a hammer was prioritized over knowing where it would lead.
And where it led was both fantastic, practical, impractical, and also – clearly – a lot of fun. Mistakes were considered learning moments and no one was prevented from participating.
What’s clear as the film unfolds is that what happened on a couple hundred acres of land in Warren, where the Prickly Mountain enclave developed, impacted the development of an entire community. Its founders were critical members of local planning commissions, select boards, development review boards.
These were some of the visionaries behind the thinking that led to the creation of the Mad River Valley Planning District and Yestermorrow and all the myriad community organizations that exist now and have their roots in those early ideals about how to live intentionally and why it mattered.
At its heart though, the film captures the joy of the era, the irreverence, the love and creativity and a hopefulness that is refreshing and much needed in 2025.
The film opens November 20 at the Big Picture in Waitsfield and runs for four nights. Find tickets at bigpicturetheater.info.
The film had its world premiere in NYC in October with the Architecture & Design Film Festival. It then premiered in LA, Vancouver, and Toronto. It will be shown in Chicago, Boston, Grace Farms, and Mumbai with the Architecture & Design Film Festival and will premiere in Christchurch, NZ at the Resene Architecture and Design Film Festival in April 2026.
Here’s a link to the movie and the trailer:
https://www.pricklymountainfilm.com/
Trailer:https://vimeo.com/1125499443?fl=pl&fe=sh
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